A Christmas Gift from William Lane Craig: 5 Lumps of Coal

William Lane Craig has written a short piece, A Christmas Gift for Atheists -- Five Reasons Why God Exists, for Fox News in which he suggests that atheists wish nothing more than to believe in his morally stunted magical sky-man. So he offers a Christmas Miracle, evidence that the magical sky-man exists.

For atheists, Christmas is a religious sham. For if God does not exist, then obviously Jesus’ birth cannot represent the incarnation of God in human history, which Christians celebrate at this time of year.

If there is one thing that distinguishes Craig from other Christian apologists, it is his intellectual fraudulence. OK, so that doesn’t really distinguish him from lots of others, but he is a fraud. He’s smart enough to know exactly why what he’s saying is dishonest, but he says it anyway. First, Craig knows that most atheists don’t think of Christmas as having any religious significance whatsoever and, a fortiori, do not see it as a religious sham. In this atheists are like 100% of the people I saw at the Wal-Mart Tuesday night, Christmas Eve, stripping the shelves to keep their toy-hungry kids satiated for a few weeks. Wal-Mart shoppers are fairly religious as Americans go; they just don’t see any connection between the secular celebration of Christmas and the supposed birth of the incarnation of their magical sky-man. Second, Craig knows that there is no evidence that Jesus was born in late December. He knows that Christmas is just a pagan holiday, Saturnalia, adapted by the Christians so that Romans would feel comfortable joining their religion. And if the story of divine incarnation in the gospels is inaccurate, then we have no reason to trust that there even was a divine incarnation at all (especially given the more extreme nature of the claim). The only religious sham here, then, is that perpetrated by religious cognoscenti who know better but let those Christians innocently believe that their savior was actually born on December 25th. Instead he pretends that the Christians are just reasonably choosing this arbitrary time to celebrate the purported event. Of course, there is no legitimate historical evidence for the birth of their savior at all, at any time, but that won’t stop Craig. In short, atheists do not see Christmas as a religious event, sham or not, but Craig is perfectly willing to let Christians have false, or unjustified, beliefs about Christmas if it keeps them safely in the Christian fold.

However, most atheists, in my experience, have no good reasons for their disbelief. Rather they’ve learned to simply repeat the slogan, “There’s no good evidence for God’s existence!”

“Most atheists.” I see. Does Craig have statistics on atheists’ lack of reasons? Obviously not. But even if they have reasons, no doubt Craig would not count these as good reasons. Still, Craig only makes the claim about most atheists in Craig’s experience. Who could doubt what his experiences have been? Maybe the only atheists he meets are squirrels in the park and voices in his head, and they certainly have no good reasons for their beliefs. If you qualify something in just the right way, it’s almost as though you haven’t said anything at all.

In any event, Craig pretends that atheists need to have just as good reason to disbelieve in God as Christians need to believe in God. Presumably Craig remains doubtful about the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and a teacup floating in space around the sun on an orbit directly opposite the earth. No one can have reasons to think that these things don’t exist either, so it only makes sense to place the burden of proof equally on those making the claim that something does not exist and on those making the claim that something does exist. Craig is subtly, but illegitimately, trying to shift the burden of proof onto the atheist.

In the case of a Christian who has no good reasons for what he believes, this slogan serves as an effective conversation-stopper. But if we have good reasons for our beliefs, then this slogan serves rather as a conversation-starter.
The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something.
The atheist who merely repeats this slogan after having been presented with arguments for God’s existence makes an empty assertion.

Not necessarily. The atheist might fairly think the reasons are not good ones. Still, if Craig purports to have evidence for the existence of God, we should examine it. What, pray tell, are these reasons that should satisfy the world’s atheists? Please explain them in 100 words or so each so as not to test the intellects of Fox’s audience of mouth-breathing morons.

So what reasons might be given in defense of Christian theism? In my publications and oral debates with some of the world’s most notable atheists, I’ve defended the following five reasons why God exists:

Look! Pointless chest-thumping! He has publications! And has debated some of the world’s most notable atheists! Perhaps he mentions this because Richard Dawkins refuses to debate him given his rather morally monstrous defense of God’s commands in the Old Testament. Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig shows why my assertion that Craig believes in a magical sky-man is accurate. He really believes the crazy stuff described in a millennia-old book of myth and fantasy. No ‘metaphysical ground of being’ for Craig; there literally is a person who commands people to kill innocent children, and that’s not only okay with Craig but something any atheist should want to believe as well.

1. God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe. Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

Theists tend to avoid, not embrace, this way of presenting the cosmological argument because to evaluate an inference to the best explanation, we have to consider simplicity, proportionality, and even the possibility of causal mechanisms. He wants us to believe in a supreme, infinitely good, wise, powerful, and intelligent being who exists outside time and space but created the universe. Since Craig’s hypothesis does not assert merely a cause but an intelligent being with several other qualities unrelated to the causation of the universe, the hypothesis is clearly not the simplest possible. Since nothing about our finite universe requires an explanation in terms of an infinite cause, his hypothesis is infinitely out of proportion to the evidence. Since we literally can have no conception of what it would mean for a mind, or anything else, to exist outside space, and especially time, Craig’s explanatory hypothesis is not even conceivable, let alone the strongest one possible. The God hypothesis is extravagant and apparently inconceivable. Finally, we have no idea how a being outside time and space could create a universe. Thus, the divine explanation is anything but the best possible one.

What other explanation could compete with the divine creation hypothesis? One possibility is that the universe (or the multiverse) has simply always existed and thus does not need an explanation. Craig claims the scientific and philosophical reasons show that the universe had a beginning. The evidence that our universe had a beginning in a singularity in space-time that expanded as a Big Bang is strong, but that does not mean that there is no alternative dimensional multi-verse in which our universe is only one part. Another possibility is that space-time itself began to exist with the singularity itself and so it makes no sense to ask for a cause (causation being a spatio-temporal notion) for the universe. Another view is that we should reserve judgment on the best explanation for the existence of the space-time singularity. Perhaps some string theory or theory of everything will ultimately provide an explanation superior to the magical sky-man hypothesis. Certainly any of these is more plausible--more conceivable and less extravagant--than the God hypothesis. Even the most extravagant physical theories, the multi-dimensional string theories, do not have the unnecessary additional properties such as being outside space and time, being personal, and having the properties of infinite intelligence, wisdom, and beneficence.

2. God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life. That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range. There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature's laws and the desperate maneuvers needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

This hoary old argument, in a fancy new lab coat, is easily dismissed. No one has established that the mere logical possibility of different values for these fundamental constants and laws implies anything about their actual probability. Is it a miracle that I have not turned into a chicken in the last second? Clearly my turning into a chicken is logically possible, but highly improbable. Until the Fine-Tuning aficionados can offer a probability estimate (based on anything other than logical possibility) for the range of these values, they are offering a mathematical argument with undefined variables. The argument only works if we think that the values our universe has are unlikely compared to other possible values but all the argument establishes is that different values are logically possible. The probability of a conjunction of variables is multiplicative, so the more such conjuncts you add, the less probable the conjunction is. However, to get the probability of the conjunction, you have to have defined values for the probability of each conjunct. Without that probability, there can be no resultant probability for the conjunction. You cannot multiply an undefined value by an undefined value and get a defined value. It’s a little like arguing that there must be a designer that caused you to have brown hair and blue eyes (given the nearly infinite shades of different colors they could be) without providing any probability estimate for your hair being brown or your eyes being blue. If it turns out the probability of each of these is high, then the probability of the conjunction would also be high. But, most importantly, the probability of the conjunction (for example, having brown hair and blue eyes) is undefined if the probabilities of the conjuncts (the individual facts, for example, having brown hair) are also undefined. The Fine-Tuning aficionados have left out the probability values necessary for their argument to work; instead, they substitute mere logical possibility. The unknown probability of variable one being as it is times the unknown probability of variable two. . . does not result in an infinitesimal probability but an unknown probability.

In any case, whatever happened to the all-powerful creator? The divine Fine-Tuner cannot create a perfect universe full of life from near its moment of creation but has to monkey around with the parameters of the laws in order to produce a universe with only one (or a relative few) tiny, temporary islands of life? As David Hume noted, the hypothesis that the designer is perfect, or close to it, is unjustified. The designer could be a child with an extra-dimensional universe-making kit, a first-time designer of universes, a senile or even long dead designer, one in a line of rather uninspired designers, each borrowing from the ideas of others. Is our universe the best the Supreme Being can do? Conscious, intelligent, moral beings seem to have existed only on this tiny blue marble in an enormous expanse of space and time, for only 1/50,000 of its existence. Most of that universe is not even visible to us. About 68% of the mass/energy of the universe is dark energy and another 27% is dark matter. This matter/energy does not appear to interact with the rest of the universe except gravitationally, so the kinds of interactions necessary for life (especially of the conscious, rational kind) are apparently not even possible. At best 5% of the matter in the universe is even the right kind of stuff to have life occur in it. [These theories could be wrong, of course, but that doesn’t make the rest of the situation any better.] Worse, the only intelligent, conscious life with the possibility of divine reward has existed in the last 2,000 years (since Jesus) of life here on earth. So, God created a universe with the purpose of creating the last 2,000 years of human history (or 2/5,000,000,000 of earth’s history) in the hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of galaxies for nearly 14 billion years. If I were infinitely powerful, wise, good, and intelligent, I think I could make intelligent, conscious life a little more common, or at least make it appear a little more quickly, provided I wanted it in the first place. [And don’t tell me that God wouldn’t perform this sort of miracle since the argument at hand is that the creation of the universe is itself essentially a miracle.] On the other hand, perhaps conscious, intelligent life is spread throughout the universe despite the appearance of vast expanses of uninhabitable planets, stars, and vacuum? Perhaps that life is hidden away from our eyes in the 95% of the universe that is dark matter/energy? Presumably each such planet, and all the dark matter and energy, gets its own incarnation of God in order to provide them an opportunity for heaven. I suppose, however, that all the dark matter beings would be out of luck since, I have it on good authority, Jesus is white. I suppose the non-Earth cultures are no worse off than all those humans from non- and pre-Christian cultures who have never had a chance to learn of their sole chance at salvation. That is to say, God might just have doomed them to an eternity of suffering for no reason other than an accident of birth. That’s about right for Craig’s God. In short, the magical sky-man hypothesis does not seem the best explanation for our rather life-deficient universe.

3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

Craig endorses, apparently, the divine command theory of morality, a theory rejected by philosophers and theologians since Socrates and the Euthyphro. Christian philosopher Gottfried Leibniz says it is a theory that makes God a bully or a tyrant. Here’s a nice article by Louise Antony on it. [Link to Antony article] Perhaps the simplest way to refute Craig is to ask how the existence of a divine lawgiver explains objective morality. Are there objective moral rules because God threatens us with eternal punishment for violating them and promises us eternal reward for adhering to them? If that is the sole basis for morality, then God is nothing but a tyrant as Leibniz noted. More reasonably, God has a reason (at least according to theism) to give the commands he did rather than others. These reasons are the basis of objective morality. So theist and atheist alike suppose there are objective moral values that exist independently of God. Craig’s questions about how, on the atheist’s view, we come to have these moral feelings are completely beside the point.

“God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness” Craig writes, and I am at a loss to know what this means. This statement is trivial if God defines morality in the way Craig appears to be suggesting. It would only be meaningful to say that God is a paradigm of goodness if goodness were logically independent of God. I assume that Craig thinks God is like the meter-rod in Paris; we measure whether and to what degree something is good or bad by comparing it to God just as we measure something’s length by comparing it to the meter rod. It’s obvious that God is not a standard we can carry about with us, unless we rely on some farcical ancient book. (Is that a God in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?) Then I can follow Jesus' moral example, as Daniel Tosh jokes, by setting people on fire and sending them to hell. Moreover, the meter rod analogy is weak since the meter at least measures something that exists independently of the rod. Perhaps the best analogy would be the rules of a game such as chess. There are rules governing how one must play chess, and they are objective, but the only force they have is over people who choose to play chess. You can break the rules of chess and then, by definition, you are no longer playing chess. The rules of chess could have been completely different and there could not be a reason to prefer one set of rules to another. The rules would not pick out the game of chess as we know it, but there would be no objective reason to prefer one game to another. However, it is not true that we can select any system of morality at all with equal justification. Morality is not arbitrary in the way the rules of chess are; morality has an objective reality that gives force to the commands independently of any divine threat or promise. God could only meaningfully be a paradigm of morality if morality exists independently of God.

4. God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Historians have reached something of consensus that the historical Jesus thought that in himself God’s Kingdom had broken into human history, and he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as evidence of that fact. Moreover, most historical scholars agree that after his crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by a group of female disciples, that various individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection despite their every predisposition to the contrary. I can think of no better explanation of these facts than the one the original disciples gave: God raised Jesus from the dead.

Naturally, historians believe none of this. But why should the opinions of historians even matter to claims of the supernatural? If historians agreed that someone presented himself as a prophet or otherwise divinely connected, we would not think that person or even his or her following required special explanation. No one asks for a divine explanation for the historical facts concerning Apollonius of Tyana, or other wandering miracle-workers who were common at that time, despite the stories about him closely paralleling those of Jesus. The best explanation of these Jesus stories is that people at the time were simply credulous. One wonders if Craig thinks the best explanation for alien abduction stories is that aliens are actually abducting drunken rednecks in remote locations before returning them to earth smelling of booze.

Please note the way Craig produces a subtle, and fallacious, appeal to the authority of the original disciples. Do we know that the original disciples believed that Jesus returned from the dead? No, we do not. We know that there must have been followers of this new religion, but we have no idea what those people believed. We do have gospels written by people within a couple of centuries of the purported events, but no serious religious scholar believes that the names on the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) actually wrote them. I know that Craig believes that these disciples wrote the gospels because he made the claim in one of those awful Lee Strobel books (The Case for Christ, I think it was). When I ask people in departments of religion whether Craig’s claim is true, they mostly just laugh. Historians think there is no testimony from eyewitnesses that Jesus did any of the things he is purported in the gospels to have done and that there is no need of divine explanations for these mundane facts.

5. God can be personally known and experienced. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Down through history Christians have found through Jesus a personal acquaintance with God that has transformed their lives.

What does God taste like anyway? (Mmmm . . . minty!) Personal experiences,of course, imply nothing about the existence of God. Scientologists often have life-changing subjective experiences. Does that imply that thetans and Xenu exists? The fact that people have certain subjective experiences is no evidence that something real corresponds to them. Didn’t Craig just mention this above in the context of dismissing the connection between atheists' subjective states of mind and objective morality? Apparently, Christian experiences are valid, but the experiences of every other religious or non-religious person are to be rejected.

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

Craig continues his insinuation that atheists are emotional but not rational people. Sadly, No’s slogan: “It’s always projection!” seems to apply here. After examining Craig’s reasons, we can see which side is using slogans and which is examining the evidence clearly. Atheists are perfectly happy celebrating holidays based on our love for other humans and our belief in the worth of this life. We don’t celebrate because we fear that a tyrannical sky-man will burn us for eternity in hell if we don’t sing loudly enough. A celebration based on mutual love and respect is worth more than one based on worship for Craig’s magical sky-man. And most Christians know that too.

Academia and Colloquia

Academics are forever giving presentations at conferences or at one university or another. It’s common enough that departments devote significant percentages of faculty salary to travel budgets. Yet these presentations at conferences and colloquia are almost uniformly, let’s say, crappy. This presents a puzzle: why do people spend so much time to present papers of dubious merit to so many different audiences, almost no members of which have the slightest knowledge of the subject of the presentation? My guess is that this activity has to do with making connections with other philosophers who can advance one’s career. For now, let me establish the uniformly low quality of these presentations from a sampling of my previous semester. As an aside, I would like to note that, while I’ve sometimes thought that philosophers are people who have never come within a mile of empirical research, this semester has shown me that this is not always the case. Sometimes the problem is that they should never be allowed near it either.

This past semester I attended the following lectures. I won’t identify the speakers because I don’t want to embarrass them, but also because the point is that these problems with the presentations are completely commonplace and the speakers don’t really deserve any special criticism for the flaws in their presentations. That is, while I am going to be callous and cruel in the following comments, I don’t think the people doing these presentations were any worse than the thousands of others who do them throughout academia.

One presentation was on language and representation that attempted to find the roots of representation, and hence misrepresentation, in some simpler (non-mental) ability that might then partially explain the variety of (mental) representational abilities humans have. Her idea was that (non-human) animal signals are predictions of their behavior that evolved or developed in order to influence the behavior of other animals. For example, a dog Fido growls at another dog Spot not to tell Spot that Spot should stay away from Fido’s bone (lest Fido bite him), but Fido’s growl simply predicted that Fido would bite Spot if Spot tried to take the bone. Thus, Spot could respond (more or less mechanically) to a predictive signal (as a kind of natural sign, in Grice’s terms) rather than as a complex representational state (e.g. Fido knows that Spot wants the bone; Fido wants to prevent Spot from taking the bone; Fido warns Spot not to try to take the bone, etc.). The speaker then tried to locate a point in evolutionary development where this ability, without more complex representational abilities, occurs. The idea was that if one could find this kind of predictive but not representational ability in a non-human animal, she would be able to then build up to true representation in humans. Here is where she ran afoul of the empirical evidence. She claimed that non-primates had this ability but not the more complex ability to deceive or misrepresent.

Unfortunately, the speaker had apparently never met a dog. If she knew any dogs, or did any research in comparative ethology, she would have known that dogs bluff. Dogs will growl at each other to warn each away from something even if they do not follow through with an attack. (This is so obvious that if you have two dogs, you’ll see it every few days in a dispute over a toy or treat. Dogs also deceive and hide things from other dogs.) I’m fairly sure there’s lots of research on this, and on deception in non-primates. The ‘prediction, not representation’ paradigm might ultimately work, but to establish it, one would need to find a clear case of one without the other and show how the less complex ability could lead naturally to the more complex by means of natural selection. My point is that, while there may be some merit to her ideas, the presentation was rather marred by a lack of basic research on an important empirical issue.

A second presentation was a libertarian on political philosophy. He had discovered empirical research on ignorance and apathy in voters and the correlation between these and race and socio-economic status. His conclusion: It’s a good thing most of these people don’t vote; we should probably do what we can to make them less likely to vote and definitely not increase their likelihood of voting. Of course being poor, female, or a minority decreases the chances one will know or care about politics and elections. So, the conclusion was that we should not go out of our way to include the disaffected non-voters into the system since that would result in less informed electorate overall. It takes an almost deliberate perversity to look at a system in which certain groups are systematically excluded or underrepresented in the political process, notice that they have little knowledge of this process and mostly don’t care about the outcomes (because no one in the political arena much represents their interests), and then, instead of concluding that we should give them something worth voting for (or some hope that their votes will matter to our politics), concluding that we are better off if they don’t vote.

The speaker had got hold of political science research that, as far as I could tell from his examples, showed that, people were largely wrong about some given bit of esoteric political information (e.g. George W. Bush supported X policy to help the poor -- who would have thought? Can you name the current Speaker of the House of Representatives? Is it Elmo or Donald Trump?). Then he concluded that the people were generally uninformed (and, in particular, that their lack of information correlated with socio-economic class, race, and gender). So what? These kinds of academic studies are a blight on the academic landscape; they take people’s ignorance of something esoteric and suggest it implies major ignorance of important cultural, social, or economic issues. In fact, given the speaker’s ‘evidence’, it was amazing that poor, black, women managed to vote at nearly 100% for the black guy for president. One would have thought they would vote for Romney thinking that Romney was a Kenyan socialist. It’s clear that ignorance of some individual piece of legislation or office holder is basically meaningless in representing the general knowledge of the electorate. Of the two major parties, which supports economic policies that are slightly less inimical to the interests of the poor and working class? Everyone knows the answer to this. The studies that pretend to show different are basically just wankery. Leaving that aside, even taken on its own terms the reasoning was crazy: if people don’t know or don’t care about their government and politicians, the solution is to give them reason to care and information and the ability to get more information about them. The solution is not to keep them out (or de facto exclude them by taking no positive action to encourage them) of the political process altogether. And don’t tell me that the speaker was just being realistic about an imperfect electorate: the dude’s actual proposed solution was to get rid of the electoral college and randomly select some few thousand voters every 2 years to do all the voting for us. Yeah, that’s going to happen.

The best part was when a student asked, without apparent irony, whether we should institute some kind of literacy test for voters to make sure only the right ones were allowed to vote. The speaker was very receptive to the idea. I’m sure there’s no historical precedent for this idea, nor any way that it might go wrong.

In a third presentation, we were treated to another libertarian. This time the talk was about harming the dead. He did not mean blowing away zombies but doing things that harm people who no longer exist. This argument comes from Epicurus who said that “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.” The basic idea from Epicurus is that we cannot be harmed by being dead because there is no subject to be harmed (or we cannot experience the harm, which I will skip because it’s less convincing to me). So, is there a possible subject of the harm of death? Maybe the person before his/her death (the ante- or pre-mortem person), not the post-mortem (nonexistent) person, is the one harmed (apparently this response is the standard solution to the problem given by Jeffrey Rosenberg). In fact, our speaker mentioned this interpretation and then, strangely, never even addressed that response to Epicurus’s argument. It’s the old, “Mention a problem for my theory up front and then conveniently forget to solve it,” gambit. (You might think it’s crazy to mention the problem if you are only going to ignore it, but philosophers like to know that you understand the problems with the position or argument you are defending. They mostly don’t really expect genuine solutions.)

Instead he talked about the particular harm of breaking promises to the dead. He focused on traditional theories of why breaking promises is wrong and then tried to show that the theories could not give a reason why breaking a promise to the dead is wrong. This is a nutty strategy since it assumes that at least one of these theories of promise-breaking is correct, and we all know that we’ve got basically no good philosophical theories of anything. Thus, the fact that none of the theories applies appropriately to the dead does not prove that the dead cannot be harmed by a broken promise. It might just mean that our theories of promise-breaking are, all of them, wrong. Notwithstanding the pointlessness of the whole strategy, even if it made sense, the speaker’s arguments all failed because he never addressed the aforementioned claim that the ante-mortem person is the subject of harm. And, because the speaker never even addressed the most common explanation for how there is a subject of harm, the speaker failed even on his own terms. I’ve got just one more thing about the weirdness of his conclusion.

Weirdly, the speaker thought we should keep promises to the dead despite the fact that they are not harmed by our promise-breaking. The only reason, on his view, we should keep our promises is because of the harm such disrespect would cause to living people since living people care about our current practices of promising and respecting the wishes of the deceased. Why do people care about whether people will keep promises to us after we are dead? If so, then we find this harmful when we are alive because we think breaking promises to us after we are dead would harm us. And, of course, the Epicurean has just argued that this belief is irrational. But, if that’s the reason people are upset about promise-breaking to the dead, then the Epicurean should not respect these irrational wishes but should view this as another opportunity for education (as Epicurus did in his general argument that death is not harmful). The point of Epicurus’ argument is revisionist; he wants to change people’s attitude toward death, so the Epicurean should want to adjust people’s attitude towards keeping promises to the dead as well. Why does the Epicurean try to change people’s attitudes about the harm of death but not try to change the, equally irrational on their view, attitude towards promise-keeping to the dead? Living people will be very upset if we break promises to the dead and won’t trust us to keep our word to them (the currently living) when they are dead. But our speaker never thought to ask: Why would these people be upset at us for breaking our word to the dead if, in fact, no one is harmed when we break our word to them? The obvious fact is that people are upset about others breaking promises to them when they are dead is because they think they will be harmed if promises made to them are broken. It makes no sense to care about their irrational beliefs about promises to the dead if you do not also care about their irrational beliefs about posthumous harms in the first place. The right Epicurean strategy is to teach us not to worry about breaking promises to the dead, not to cater to their irrationality (assuming, as the Epicurean does, that it is irrational).

You might as well shout at people in Church that their prayer is useless because God does not exist (because Epicureans want to change people’s minds) and then refuse to take the Lord’s name in vain because it might upset people. The two beliefs come as a piece: if it’s useless to pray, then it’s not bad to take the Lord’s name in vain.

These lectures were not in any way unrepresentative of those given as long as I have been around philosophy and philosophy departments. And despite their obvious flaws, these talks weren’t completely useless. Attendees learn a little bit about some otherwise unfamiliar areas of philosophy. Presenters talk about their research with a receptive audience, and presumably we all come away better informed with more research ideas bubbling away in the seething cauldrons of our creative unconscious. The author comes away with some valuable criticism from a small group of mostly uninformed semi-experts. The visiting lecturer gets a small payment (usually; some of these pay a lot, but some pay nothing at all) and a short vacation and a chance to talk to old friends. Maybe there’s a bit of socialization. The problem is not that they are useless but that the ratio of good ideas to time spent is very low for almost everyone. I would do better reading an article in my field (or an introduction to a different field) rather than listen to one of these lectures. The author would get better feedback sending the paper to a single interested expert.

So what justifies the time and effort of these lectures? The only purpose I can see that justifies the effort is networking and making connections. Academic philosophy operates largely according to (as a friend of mine called it) good old American know-who. Philosophers’ evaluations play a role in hiring and tenure decisions. To take just one example, big-time philosophers do not write generic letters of recommendation for graduate programs; they write a letter specifically to a friend (not necessarily even on the hiring committee) at the university where a student is applying. And their friends listen and respond in kind. The relationship is incestuous, with people knowing each other having more influence than do apparently objective factors. A much better student who happened not to know an influential philosopher would be less likely to gain acceptance than some worse students who do. It allows for implicit bias; people tend to prefer those who are like them, and so tend to give preference to relatively affluent white male students. Thus, the influence of networks of philosophers creates unfair and biased decisions about acceptance into graduate programs, and decisions involving hiring and tenure. The insidious part is that the people with influence do not see this as a problem; they think that the old-boys’-network is the best way to conduct business. They trust their own judgment about other philosophers and their work (more than they trust statistical or other evidence), and they don’t think they should lessen the influence of their own judgments. This situation cannot be changed by those who have little or no influence (by definition). The only way change can come is if people without influence, who see the inequities in the system, become influential (by their own merit, presumably) and change the culture from the top. But people who become successful within such a system are extremely unlikely to change that culture since it is the one they see (rightly or wrongly) as quite properly rewarding them. So, the waste of people’s time every few weeks is a small price to pay for the ability of philosophers to increase their influence and bring people within their network of influence.

I’m not offering a solution. I suppose we would be better off if academic colloquia were ended. Perhaps if our socialization came only at blind-reviewed conferences the role of networking could be reduced. But, alas, I’m in no position to effect that change. I suppose we all like an excuse to visit friends on someone else’s dime. And networking might help long-term research if philosophers who actually do work on the same questions meet. If there’s no other way to find people working on the same questions you are, then giving presentations might be a necessity. Still, to the extent that this practice supports the networks of personal influence, it is a mildly pernicious part of academia. It would be better if there were a way to do without it.

My apologies to anyone whom I have unfairly maligned in the above. I hope I understood all the papers presented and explained them fairly (even if too briefly).

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, An Unpublishable Review

Thomas Nagel has written a book, Mind and Cosmos, a slim volume mostly of other people’s ideas, on the possibility of reductive physicalist explanations for certain aspects of our minds. He believes these criticisms undermine not just the metaphysical position of physicalism or materialism but also the scientific explanations of the origins of these aspects of our minds. Thus, the general metaphysic is inadequate, but also the specific scientific theories, especially evolution by natural selection, must also fail since they are more a consequence of that metaphysic than evidential support for it.

This last is typical creationist boilerplate made more polite for a sophisticated audience: scientists only believe in evolution because they are already committed to a naturalistic or physicalist metaphysic. Without that assumption, the evidence could never be seen as adequate. The yawning gulf between what stands in need of explanation and what the (current) naturalistic picture is capable of explaining would be too great but for the naturalist’s spectacles which make that gulf seem only a small gap. What, then, are these gaps?

Nagel’s book covers three areas of human mental life, or knowledge, and argues that they cannot be accounted for either reductively (e.g. in terms of underlying or lower-level physical facts such as facts about brain activity) or historically (e.g. in terms of their origin by means of evolution). The three amigos, the Irreducibles we might call them, are consciousness, especially the subjective character of our experience, reason, especially the abstract capacity to think logically, and morality. Each of these resists reductive and/or evolutionary explanation, Nagel claims, and so our current popular conception of evolution as a potentially complete explanation of the origin and characteristics of humanity should be rejected and our worldview must be expanded to include fundamental elements of teleology in the world (even if that teleology is, as noted, elemental rather than derived from the intentions of a designer).

Nagel’s book is a light, but nonetheless baffling, read, not so much in the issues it covers, but in the major fields of research it dismisses. His casual dismissal of entire scientific disciplines and areas of philosophical research makes it much easier for him to propose his own half-baked ideas as legitimate alternatives. For example, in his introductory chapter, Nagel writes, “I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples” (ibid). Here Nagel runs together questions about biogenesis (origin of living things) with evolution of those living things once they exist and treats them as both equally problematic. He demands a complete chemical and physical (as in, physics) explanation of development of life from non-life and of our current forms from the earliest forms of life. It is hard to believe that Nagel could dismiss the entire field of evolutionary biology as he appears to above, but he concludes this paragraph with two questions, one about biogenesis, and the other about evolution. He writes, “In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?” (p. 6) His implicit answer is that a sufficient number of random mutations is not very likely and so random mutation (even combined with other natural means of introducing genetic variation) cannot be the sole mechanism of evolutionary variation. Nagel really is asserting that the myriad fields of biology devoted to evolution, molecular genetics, and all the rest, constitute only, “a schema for explanation, supported by some examples” (ibid). This description would fit Nagel’s book much better than it does the scientific fields devoted to the study of evolution if only he provided a schema of explanation or some examples. Nagel’s hubris is stunning.

On the specifics of his charges of an explanatory gap, we find consciousness, reason and morality. Nagel says little enough about consciousness that what he does say is easy enough to dismiss here. No doubt he believes that this issue has seen more than its share of spilled ink, and I agree about that, and he would rather not belabor the arguments. Perhaps he is right and consciousness cannot be explained in terms of the underlying physical activities in our brains, or given an adequate functional analysis, but I do not believe that Nagel or anyone else has made this case successfully. Nothing in this short work adds anything to his case. In his famous Bat-paper , Nagel argued that consciousness is essentially subjective and scientific explanation is essentially objective. Hence, there is an essential gap in our understanding of consciousness that cannot be filled from that objective, scientific direction. We all know about the Bat paper and the not-knowing-what-it-is-like-i-ness of bats from our human perceptual and conceptual framework, but nothing in the argument implies that bat-facts are not physical facts or that bat-knowledge is not physical knowledge. Nagel bases his argument on a perceived need for extrapolation or imaginability of the bat’s experience, but that is simply irrelevant to explanation, scientific or otherwise. We may not be able to imagine what it is like to be bat (although, who knows, maybe some of us can), but it does not follow that we would have no explanation of the bat’s experience. If physicalism is true, physical knowledge of the world exhausts all the knowledge of the world. But the extrapolation from bat experience is not knowledge, it is imagined experience. Or if that bat-extrapolation is knowledge, Nagel has never established that this knowledge is not a kind of physical knowledge.

In Mind and Cosmos Nagel leaves all his bats at home (in his belfry?) and relies more on the explanatory gap version of the argument. There is a gap in our ability to understand consciousness that no objective knowledge can fill. Of course, if Nagel is correct, no matter what type of theory one proposes (substance dualist, property-dualist, emergentist, teleological) one cannot fill that gap. Unless Nagel can explain how teleology (which is not subjective either) can fill the gap, then his argument from the explanatory gap must equally undermine his own proposal. In any event, Nagel, from his armchair, demands what he has no right to demand, a full picture of a scientific theory that is still in the earliest stages of development. We don’t yet know how to conceive consciousness in a way that will render it susceptible to reductive explanation, whatever concepts do ultimately allow for the understanding of consciousness will arise from efforts at scientific explanation and we cannot foretell, effectively, whether such concepts are forthcoming without letting that research run its course. Nagel would serve us all better by helping light a candle rather than complaining about the dark, or, worse, trying to blow out whatever candle might be lit on the grounds that what we need is a spotlight.

Nagel’s second Irreducible is reason, such as our ability in logic, mathematics, and other abstract areas, perhaps relating to scientific methodology. Here Nagel relies on the ideas of Alvin Plantinga, arguing that there is no good evidence to think that mental capacities that evolved in order for us to survive would be turned to good use in proving theorems in abstract symbolic logic systems (for example). Thus, since clearly we do have such an ability, and cannot even reasonably doubt that ability, we must doubt that we in fact evolved it. First, if Nagel has ever taught a symbolic logic class, he must know that we are not very good at abstract reasoning. (In a moment we will see him exemplify the very problem here.) It requires considerable effort on our parts to learn these skills, and we are often subject to errors in reasoning that no amount of education can fully excise. We can at best substitute formal judgments based on our symbolic systems for our intuitive judgments; we cannot make the intuitive judgments fully disappear. The types of errors we make even tend to be largely consistent with evolution in that we tend to make errors that would not undermine our survival. For example, we tend to infer causation far too quickly from too little or unrepresentative data. That kind of causal error makes some sense given an evolutionary context since we are unlikely to be penalized by evolution for erroneously thinking there is a causal connection between two things, and we might be penalized (i.e. killed) for failing to draw an inference to a causal relationship that is there. Cognitive psychologists are attempting even now (with, I would say, not enough success) to trace the origins of our ability to reason using conditionals to some capacity evolved by our social, Pleistocene ancestors. People are very poor at reasoning with conditionals in abstract contexts (e.g. the Wason selection task) yet are quite capable of performing formally identical reasoning in other contexts, so the differences in the contexts may tell us what evolutionary forces operated to produce the ability. Although a good theory here is somewhat lacking (in my humble opinion), the fact that we fail at the abstract tasks suggests that we do not, in fact, have natural capacity to reason in this abstract way. Instead we may have learned to apply logical rules in some situations and have only recently learned to extend that reasoning to symbolic and mathematical forms. Evolutionary theory does not undermine the possibility of abstract reasoning. Indeed, it is consistent with the particular abilities we find that humans have. External instruments, language and symbols, have allowed us to turn simple intuitions evolved in a context far different from our current one of abstract logic, mathematics, and science. We did not evolve fingers to type on keyboards, but we have managed to turn those fingers effectively to such a task.

Perhaps the wonder of it is that we are ever capable of good logical reasoning at all, but if we were completely bad at logical reasoning, we would never survive to reproduce at all. For example, if I were incapable of recognizing contradictions in statements, so that when I came to believe, “There is a tiger over there,” I would still be capable of believing, “There is no tiger over there.” (Let’s avoid those cases in which people really are capable of believing inconsistently.) Needless to say, harboring these beliefs together would not improve my chances of survival. And, indeed, we know that people can develop languages and tools to improve this abstract reasoning just as we invented hammers and saws to improve our ability to build houses. Our ability to check with each other might just have spread the popularity of certain errors, but generally intersubjective verification of our logical rules has improved our reasoning as well. How is it possible that checking with other equally fallible people has led to better reasoning? I’m not sure, but I know that my perceptions are not always accurate, and conferring with other, also imperfect perceivers, appears to render my judgments more reliable.

Nagel is aware of the way in which external scaffolding (such as these external tools) can allow for the extension of our more basic abilities, but he rejects the response. He writes, “But the explanation of our ability to acquire and use language in these ways presents problems of the same order, for language is one of the most important normatively governed faculties. To acquire a language is in part to acquire a system of concepts that enables us to understand reality.” (p. 71)

How easy to be a philosopher! Is there research on the evolution of language? Is there any progress on the problem of explaining meaning and language? I’m no expert on this, but no doubt there is work on this question. And that work is not the same work as the study of logic and abstract reasoning. Yet, somehow, Nagel feels no need even to ask whether there is such work or, if there is such work, how successful it is. Nagel is content to assume that whatever problem afflicts one domain must afflict every related domain, so we can have no confidence that the problems can be solved (by decomposing them into simpler problems, perhaps). However, we do not need to pretend that these problems are insoluble just because Nagel remains ignorant of attempts to solve them.

Nagel himself raises the analogy of reason to perception. He writes, “[T]here is a crucial difference: in the perceptual case I can recognize that I might be mistaken, but on reflection, even if I think of myself as the product of Darwinian natural selection, I am nevertheless justified in believing the evidence of my senses for the most part, because this is consistent with the hypothesis that an accurate representation of the world around me results from senses shaped by evolution to serve that function.” (p. 80)

Surely we can, and often do, become less confident in our perceptual judgments if we come to recognize through a more reliable scientific study that our perceptual apparatus is inaccurate. We could even, in theory, discover that evolution would not provide us with the tools for an accurate perception. I may distrust my perceptual judgment that my stove is giving off no light because I recognize from other scientific research that my sensory apparatus is not attuned to the proper frequencies of light to judge accurately. So, perception is the basis for our knowledge of the external world, but it is subject to correction by testing its coherence with others' perceptions and sophisticated theorizing that, itself, is ultimately based on perception. Thus, it is possible that our more sophisticated theorizing about evolution might undermine our trust in our senses in some particular case.

Nagel intends, I think, to argue that natural selection might undermine knowledge claims based on perception (it is, in the language of epistemology, a possible defeater). However, he puts the point in a very odd, indeed logically invalid, way. He claims consistency with evolution supports the accuracy of the senses, but it is more correct to say that a failure of consistency would undermine the accuracy of the senses. These are two logically distinct points, and it is important not to confuse them. Nagel wants to say that evolution could undermine belief in the accuracy of perception, but it does not follow from this that evolution supports the accuracy of perception. The error here is a simple formal fallacy:

If not P (A is inconsistent with B), then not Q (A undermines B).
Therefore if P, then Q.

Here are two analogies to show that this argument form is invalid:

If you are not 16 or older, then you cannot drive legally.
Therefore if you are 16 or older, then you can drive legally.

Alternatively,

If Lassie is not a mammal, then Lassie is not a cat.
Therefore if Lassie is a mammal, then Lassie is a cat.

Obviously, the premise of each of these arguments is true and the conclusion false. So Nagel is guilty of a fairly simple error in formal reasoning. This problem is primarily one of presentation, but it actually nicely illustrates the problem he claims we do not have. We, all of us, even famous philosophers, struggle with formal reasoning, and part of the reason for that may be that we evolved in an environment in which abstract reasoning was not as evolutionarily useful as it is today. Thus, we might see how our belief in evolution might explain errors in abstract reasoning that we already know exist.

As I said above, Nagel considers the analogy to perception but rejects the analogy on the grounds that we could have reasons based on our understanding of evolution to reject a belief or weaken our confidence in a perceptual judgment, but we could not so doubt our logical abilities. He writes, “By contrast, in a case of reasoning, if it is basic enough, the only thing to think is that I have grasped the truth directly. I cannot pull back from a logical inference and reconfirm it with the reflection that the reliability of my thought processes is consistent with the hypothesis that evolution has selected them for accuracy. That would drastically weaken the logical claim.” (p. 80) It is not possible, he thinks, to doubt the validity of the most basic inference patterns we use. (How could we doubt the inference patterns we use to evaluate the validity of an inference pattern?)

The clause, “if it is basic enough”, appears to cover a multitude of sins. If we decide, collectively, that certain popular forms of reasoning, such as affirming the consequent, are invalid, then those must not have been basic enough forms of reasoning.

Unfortunately, Nagel does not explain precisely which logical judgments are such that no amount of evidence about the infirmities of our logical systems could undermine them. We do know, however, that people’s intuitive judgments of validity in the aforementioned Wason selection task are not to be trusted. We teach our students not to trust the inferences of denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent. Perhaps it was only the construction of abstract logical systems using rules and language that weakened our collective confidence in these patterns of inference. In theory it ought to be possible to show by means of an evolutionary argument that some inference pattern we frequently rely on is untrustworthy. I do not know of any such argument, but that should weaken Nagel’s point.

Now Nagel is likely to argue that some logical reasoning patterns are so far beyond dispute that no rational agent could deny them. For example, nothing can both have property P at a time and lack property P at that same time. Is this so intuitively obvious that no amount of evolutionary, or other, reasoning could weaken our confidence in it? Not really. It is possible, but perhaps not likely, that discoveries in quantum mechanics might lead us to doubt even this apparently indisputable belief. We might have difficulty understanding how we could be wrong, but we might still judge that we are. We might be forced to think that some other, better, reasoning must take precedence over the intuitive judgment. However, I think we have good reason to think these most basic inferences cohere with evolution. Any organisms so constituted as to misunderstand basic facts of logic (presuming this is a fact) would have, in Willard Quine’s words, “a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.” We find, in fact, that an evolutionary understanding of our reason is probably compatible with these simple logical truths.

Perhaps Nagel means that, while in fact we do not doubt these logical inferences, the real issue is that we could not doubt them while remaining rational agents. But I do not think this is true; I think our systematization of logic (for example) has led to changes in what we take to be intuitively valid, and that we have in fact changed (collectively) what we take to be the basic patterns of inference. And in those cases in which we found good reason to distrust our logical inferences, we might note that they are broadly consistent with an evolutionary account of our origins. We do manage to do better than our forebears because of our construction of elaborate tools such as language, symbol systems, and ‘the’ scientific method. The fact that it took us this long to develop these things, and that they are needed at all, suggests that we are not good at abstract reasoning. This is not inconsistent with evolution.

The third amigo, the third Irreducible, is moral reasoning. Nagel believes there are abstract moral rules that govern us, that oblige us to act in certain ways. These rules could not, according to the argument of one Sharon Street, be discovered or be part of our evolutionary history. Thus, if evolution is true, we have no good reason to think we would know these moral rules. Yet, according to Nagel, we have them nonetheless. It follows that we did not evolve by means of natural selection.

This argument based on the epistemic opacity of morality may just be a special case of the abstract reasoning argument. If moral rules are abstract rules, then they should be just as amenable to discovery as any other abstract truth (about logic or mathematics, say). If morality can be naturalized in some way, then these concerns about moral knowledge would disappear. I am not sanguine about such reductive efforts. If morality can be naturalized, it can be known as other natural facts are, or it is abstract, and thus known as abstract facts are. But, either way, morality seems no less knowable than any other abstract area.

Most of Nagel’s explanation of this issue relates to the abstractness of the judgments, but it does raise the question of how knowledge of morality could enhance our fitness to survive. How does knowing moral right from wrong lead the knower to have a survival advantage over those who know only social rules and customs? This appears to be a puzzle.

First, however, we should question his adaptationism. Why think that every faculty or belief must enhance our fitness in order for it to exist? Perhaps knowledge of morality is exaptive (in Stephen Jay Gould's coinage); it might be a consequence of some other abilities that are adaptive. Just as the ability to hitchhike is not adaptive, but it follows from the ability to use opposable thumbs in other contexts, and those other abilities are adaptive. Nagel should provide some argument that a moral faculty must enhance our survival in order for it to exist.

Second, we might suggest ways in which a moral faculty would be adaptive. It is fairly clear that knowing the customs of our community enhances our survival. Whether we follow the mores of our society or not, we need to know what those mores are when we deal with others in that society. It might turn out that knowledge of morality makes it much easier to understand the customs of society. If, for example, people sometimes do things simply because they are the right things to do, moral knowledge would be essential for predicting their behavior. Altruism, for example, appears not to be an evolutionarily adaptive trait since individuals who work for the common good must give up some benefit to themselves to help others. What really is most beneficial is to appear to be altruistic while not really being altruistic at all. (This is Glaucon’s Challenge, the famous problem that drives Plato’s Republic.) Yet it may not be easy to appear to be altruistic while not being so (just as it is often easier to be honest than to lie consistently and convincingly). Perhaps knowledge of morality makes it easier to discern these rules. Similarly, we might discover when we interact with other cultures that they adhere to only some of our culture’s rules, and that knowledge of genuine morality may allow for productive interaction and cooperation with another culture. Knowledge of morality may enable predictions and explanations of the behavior of others, especially those who do not share our culture, that would not otherwise be possible. Any suggestion along these lines is highly speculative. It may be that only recently have different cultures treated each other as morally important agents, and hence moral knowledge would not help us in our dealings with them. However, speculative or not, these possibilities should be considered, yet Nagel prefers to ignore any theories about the evolution of morality and moral knowledge.

Thus, Nagel’s negative case appears to fail. He offers very weak reasons to think that we did not evolve or that our capacities cannot be explained physically or historically. The arguments are typical arguments from ignorance: we do not know how such a capacity would evolve, and so we must think that it could not. But even with no good reason to reject the naturalistic consensus, Nagel ventures into the uncharted waters of the teleological.

Nagel sometimes suggests that life and humanity exist because it is good that they exist, that the physical world is shaped in some way, not simply by causal, mechanical laws, but by intrinsic value-features of the world. He notes that much evil exists, so whatever this feature of the world is that explains our existence, it cannot be simply a matter of moral value. Nagel might also be aware that evolution is not always a ‘progressive’ process. Some organisms lose complexity in order to survive in a given environment. Some male angler fish, for example, lose a great deal of complexity in order to mate with a female and devolve, one might say, into something like a simple parasite with little of the physical complexity of the female. So the male loses all the complexity necessary to function as an independent fish, and gains in reproductive success by attaching itself to the female. Whatever teleological explanation there is for the world, it must either have rather notable exceptions or it must not lead inexorably to the good, beautiful, or complex. But now we must say that Nagel’s hoped-for explanantia have been drained of all substance. There is, he claims, a natural tendency towards certain ends, but these ends are not definable in terms of any identifiable properties of organisms or the world. So, we must conclude that there is a natural tendency towards those ends that have actually occurred (excluding, perhaps, nature’s many failed experiments and extinct creatures) and away from those that have not. These assertions of teleology are often so hedged with question-begging assumptions that they are effectively empirically meaningless.

While Nagel’s teleology is likely just an unfalsifiable posit, of no use to anyone, the danger of such ideas is that the hedging tends to be forgotten when it comes to explanations. Despite acknowledging in certain contexts that there are innumerable exceptions to the trend toward X (whatever the favored characteristic is supposed to be), the author frequently recurs to teleological explanations when the ends reflect the values of the author. Unfalsifiable claims may play no role in genuine science, but the careful hedging of those claims to avoid empirical disconfirmation is forgotten, and we get to see ourselves as being the logical end-point and meaning of all existence. This kind of egocentrism is conducive neither to humility nor to good science.

Further, while Nagel’s theory might appear vacuous, if it is to have any substance, the theory must posit teleological factors that play some role in the disposition of physical objects. Thus, the entelechies (we’ll borrow the Aristotelian term for the rest of the paragraph to indicate the telos that exists inherently in nature) in our organisms that lead them to survive must somehow cause changes in our DNA and our chromosomes so that the appropriate mutations will occur to lead to the ordained outcome. If the end of the koala bear is to dine only on eucalyptus leaves, the DNA of the koala bear must somehow be modified or constrained so that these features of the bear arise. But how are these entelechies to accomplish this? Do they have the power to cause mutations? Do they break apart DNA molecules and put them back together in line with their end? If so, these entelechies must violate whatever we believe we know about basic physics. If the development of our bodies depends on the structure of our DNA, then that DNA must be susceptible to influence from these entelechies. If these entelechies are to have this power, they must violate the laws of physics and chemistry which govern movements of molecules, or the entelechies must themselves be fundamental forces of chemistry and physics that appear only in certain contexts (presumably untestable contexts) to modify those organisms, but never in a laboratory. Otherwise, why would we never have discovered them? If the telos is endemic to the fundamental constituents of matter, then we should discover them in our particle physics labs. But we have never discovered anything other than laws (perhaps probabilistic) of nature. And, if the world is fundamentally constituted of physical matter, then there is no special reason that laboratory experiments should be exempt from these forces. So, if the telos is to exist, it must either be so subtle that it evades detection in laboratories, or so clever that it only affects the world outside the laboratory. And, again, how does the telos know whether it is operating in a laboratory, in the study of fruitflies, say, or in the natural world? The fact that we have never discovered a telos at the level of fundamental particles, or at the level of experimental genetics and biology in a laboratory, makes these teleological factors either utterly epiphenomenal or comic-book supervillains capable of evading detection yet still working their magic whenever it counts. Neither view makes much sense.

Thomas Nagel, most famous for kicking up dust and then complaining about the acuity of our visual apparatus, in his paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’(What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review, pp.435-50, 1974. (Online text) now kicks about in the dirt of the biological sciences and finds himself rather unable to raise much. To conclude that his three cases, consciousness, abstract reason, and moral knowledge, somehow undermine the naturalist and evolutionary consensus in the explanation of human origins would be to prefer hope and self-aggrandizement to evidence. Nagel provides no significant reason to doubt that evolution can explain human origins or that there is a reductive explanation for these human capacities. And Nagel’s proposed alternative is so half-baked that one must speculate that unless it is part of the telos of Mind and Cosmos to be accepted by a wide audience, there is little chance that anyone, outside the circles of evidence-averse creationists (who will always look for useful tools), will take it seriously.

Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, an Unpublishable Review, part 1

I had this weird idea, since I blog about atheism some, that I might look at the theist books that have been written in response to the new atheist movement. So I ordered a book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, that was highly touted in its Amazon reviews (which, admittedly, could have been written by his friends), to see in what way the new atheists were fundamentally wrong, overly-simplistic, misguided, and just plain wrong. (I wrote ‘wrong’ twice. That’s just how wrong they are!) I thought it might be fun if there were some ridiculous arguments to pick apart.

This book operates in the tradition of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberals Are the Real Big Poopyheads! (no, not that one, the first one). Feser either is part of the right-wing movement or he knows them well, because the book constantly pushes the victimization of all right thinking people by the atheists running the universities, the media, and the government. (They’re even hiding under your bed!) I must confess I was forced to skim some of the more tedious parts. The preface, for example, is a typical polemic about gay marriage undermining our God-given moral values, secular humanism destroying our society, etc. The true surprise in this volume is the extent to which he insults the intelligence, scholarship, and character of his atheists (on pages viii, ix, xi, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 19 on the first 20 pages [and that doesn’t include distortions or problematic interpretations of their ideas]), especially in the context of accusing his opponents of acting superior and insulting theists. Clearly, he commits ad hominem fallacies and strawmen, but the irony is his use of ad hominem attacks on someone while accusing the opponent of committing ad hominems. This style of reasoning deserves a special name, and I’ve come to think of it as a defining feature on the right. The website Sadly, No has the motto: "It’s always projection." Since it takes other fallacies as subsidiary parts, it cannot be taken as a subset of another fallacy, so I propose to call it the “Double Wingnut” because wingnuts are doing exactly what they are accusing the other side of doing. "Look at how condescending and insulting that uneducated dolt is being!" (I cannot help having the feeling that even diagnosing the fallacy counts as a triple wingnut, but I refuse to get any more self-referential.)

Given the quantity of these insults, one wonders what the purpose of the book is. It purports to present a more convincing argument for the existence of God than the new atheists have addressed, or even could address. But, again, given the excessive insults, it cannot be intended to reach the atheists themselves, or anyone sympathetic to the atheist position, and it is unlikely to appeal to anyone in the broad middle of American political or religious thought (for example, claiming "Its [the rejection of the Aristotelian scientific and metaphysical picture] logical implications can also be seen in today's headlines: in the abortion industry's slaughter of millions upon millions of unborn human beings. . ."). Given these outrageous assertions, the work cannot reach out to people of good conscience who disagree (since, apparently, atheists, or even just non-Aristotelian theists, are moral monsters) or to those as yet undecided on the issue. Thus, I believe the purpose of the book is to preach to the choir, to salve the egos of the converted who feel disrespected and humiliated by those smarty-pants atheists with their English accents and academic credentials.

As part of the Goldberg tradition, a Goldberg variation if you will, Feser wants to convince you, dear wingnut reader, that it is really those liberal, atheist academics with their fancy degrees and awards and prizes who are actually stupid, whereas you, the semi-literate mouth-breather, are the true illuminated ones. Anyway, reading this book is slow going because so much of it is aimed at massaging the egos of the morons [heavens, I'm so hostile and dismissive!] who constitute his primary audience, and it takes a considerable amount of time actually to get to some of the arguments for the existence of God. I have not done a word count, but it certainly seemed that more words were devoted to gratuitous insults than to actually presenting arguments for the existence of God.

Since it is impossible to refute his points one at a time in a blog post, I thought I would pick out three instances indicating his rather questionable insinuations and inferences.

1. In the preface, Feser attributes the following quote to Richard Dawkins on critics of evolution:

They are “ignorant, stupid, insane and wicked” (Feser p. xi), and this is “evidence of [Dawkins’s] arrogance and intolerance” (as Dawkins himself says in this article).

What Dawkins actually wrote, in an article titled “Ignorance Is No Crime”, is the following (which I also quote from the above link):

"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."

The review (reproduced here) continues, (I couldn’t find the original online.)

If that gives you offense, I'm sorry. You are probably not stupid, insane or wicked; and ignorance is no crime in a country with strong local traditions of interference in the freedom of biology educators to teach the central theorem of their subject. I recently toured East Coast radio stations, doing phone-ins. I came away optimistic. I had expected hostile barracking from creationists with closed minds. Instead, what I found was genuine curiosity and honest interest. I got sincere questions from intelligent people who really wanted to know because they had literally no education in evolution.

This is clearly not insulting the vast majority of Americans; he is insulting people in the creationist movement who study the issue of evolution enough to understand (apparently) the evidence yet continue to disbelieve in evolution. Most ordinary folk in America who do not believe in the theory of evolution have never had a chance to learn the basic facts (believe me, this is true) and so are, by dint of lacking knowledge, by definition ignorant of the vast amount of evidence for the theory. Some sophists, such as Duane Gish and Henry Morris, who appear to have studied evolution and travel the country arguing against the theory are something other than ignorant. I cannot agree with the “insane” (although there is some moral failing here), but I actually think it’s a more complicated matter of self-deception and motivated error. So, Dawkins’s statement left out some slightly more charitable options, but he was not insulting the common people who do not know the evidence for evolution as ignorant because people who do not know this evidence are, by definition, ignorant of it. (And, as far as I'm concerned, it's not possible to insult Duane Gish too much!)

Still, perhaps Dawkins missed the diagnosis of the sophists running the creationist movement. However, I would like to refer back to Feser’s purported Dawkins quote. Feser claims he called them “ignorant, stupid, insane and wicked” when Dawkins actually said they were “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).” I don’t know the source of Feser’s misquotation (although it seems to have dropped the “or” in translation on many Christian apologetics websites, and Feser, presumably, got it from some such source and added the “and” himself to make it more grammatical), but if he cannot tell the difference between an “and” and an “or” (or did not check the quotation for accuracy), then he is in no position to be writing a book involving logic (or research).

2. The second example is from Feser's first chapter on the topic of Antony Flew’s conversion to deism. The chapter begins with the anecdote of that famed atheist’s conversion late in life. Feser does not address most of the significant reasons philosophers had for questioning Flew’s conversion. Mark Oppenheimer, writing in the New York Times Magazine explains reasons to have doubts about the provenance of 'Flew’s' book. It raises many reasons to doubt that Flew wrote this book himself. For example, the new book does not address arguments Flew himself made in the past. There is no indication that the author is aware of Flew’s arguments or has any explanation for why Flew’s view might have changed. Most telling to me is Flew’s unfamiliarity with the authors that “his” book makes primary use of in its arguments. Indeed, Flew essentially confessed, in the interview with the author of the NY magazine article, to not writing or remembering much of what was purported to be primarily his own work. I don’t care much for authority; religious belief depends more on authority and revelation than does atheism. So, my point is It’s unfortunate if Flew was misused by religious friends, as it appears, in order to advance their agenda. I do not place any particular value on authority, so I care little whether Flew changed his mind. But my point now is to critique Feser’s conclusion from the episode:

This episode illustrates, in several respects, the main themes of this book. In their condescending assumption that belief in God could only be the product of wishful thinking, stupidity, ignorance, or intellectual dishonesty; in their corresponding refusal seriously to consider the possibility that that belief might be true and the arguments for it sound; and in their glib supposition that the only rational considerations relevant to the question are scientific ones, rather than philosophical; in all of these attitudes Flew’s critics manifest the quintessential mindset of modern secularism…[i]t is a mindset that echoes the closed-minded prejudice and irrationality it typically attributes to religious believers themselves.

Of course, Oppenheimer does none of these things. He does not assume that belief in God could only be the product of wishful thinking etc. Instead, he considers Flew’s older writings, interviews Flew about ‘his’ newer writings, asks about the inconsistencies, finds Flew unable to respond to them at all (merely admitting to the inconsistency upon prodding) and unable to even recognize the authors that ‘he’ used copiously in ‘his’ own book. Could the reasons given in the book be good ones? The Times author never says, but what looks increasingly clear is that they were not Flew’s reasons. And that is the subject of the article.

What of the other critics who concluded that Flew must have been senile before reading ‘his’ book? That is not so clear. It could be that the ground covered by intelligent design and cosmological arguments is so well known that they thought it unlikely that ‘Flew’s’ book could provide convincing new reasons to accept them. Given Flew’s previous philosophical work and acumen, and, perhaps, the known inadequacies of the arguments, the best explanation for his conversion might be given in terms of psychological debilitation and manipulation by religious friends. There is good reasons to doubt that Flew was the author of these works, and the ‘condescending’ attitudes of the atheists might reflect this article as much as their preexisting beliefs about the arguments ‘Flew’ presented.

There is some possibility that some of the critics were rejecting ‘Flew’s’ arguments out of hand. It’s not obvious that this is closed-minded. No one has time to read everyone else’s work. Am I close-minded for thinking that Absolute Idealism is an untenable philosophical position despite my never having read Professor M.Q. Snerdley’s learned dissertation on the topic? Not really. The arguments in the given field are mostly well-known, and philosophers (or professional atheists) have worked out their views on them in some detail.

Moreover, Feser is a bit carried away by his rhetoric. How does this episode illustrate anything about atheists’ “glib supposition that the only rational considerations relevant to the question are scientific ones, rather than philosophical” (Feser p. 2)? Seriously, where did that come from? No one quoted said anything about scientific considerations superceding philosophical ones. Some noted Flew’s exposure to recent scientific ideas all came through the religious friends who may have presented evidence to him in a misleading or biased way. Science is clearly relevant to the intelligent design argument, so there was some mention of science in the Flew affair, but no one insinuated that science alone was relevant to the issue.

More generally, Feser takes great offense at the condescension, hostility, and distortions of the new atheist movement while condescendingly distorting their position and reasons. This is the classic Double Wingnut. He drips scorn for the opposition on the basis of their scornfulness. No doubt some atheists responded scornfully in their heart of hearts or in the innermost recesses of their atheist bastions, but he does nothing to address the actual published work on the issue.

3. The third incident illustrates that Feser is writing not just an anti-atheist screed but also a political screed against a perceived atheist-dominated liberal political agenda. So, he connects his book to ongoing political events. This third illustration of the author’s poor presentation of opposing positions involves his claim that atheists ("secularists," as he styles them--although secularism is clearly a distinct position from atheism) see themselves as rational and moral, rather than as the deeply corrupted, hell-bound, Satan’s-sex-slaves that they are. He writes,

[S]ecularists took to defining themselves as members of the “reality-based community,” in contrast to the purportedly “faith-based community” of religious believers.

No doubt many atheists would see things this way, but he inaccurately describes the origin and use of the term “reality-based community”. Here’s the quotation from Ron Suskind talking about his interviews with members of the George W. Bush administration, including an anonymous aide, before the 2004 presidential election:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The phrase was adopted by political liberals in opposition to the Bush administration as a kind of badge of honor unwittingly bestowed upon them by their opponents. People on the political right tended to view this as an erroneous claim, especially because the quote was anonymous. Liberals liked the idea of being interested in studying reality, understanding it, and devising carefully-crafted responses to it. The Bush administration, on the other hand, created their own reality by their actions. The Bush’s advisor’s phrase had a weirdly post-modern feel to it, but the moniker was taken as an honorific rather than an insult by liberals who believed the Bush administration was insufficiently interested in the study of objective reality and so acted without adequate understanding of it with catastrophic results, as predicted by said members of the reality-based community. Thus, the label was taken by liberals, not secularists; it was adopted as indicating an opposition to their political opponents, not religious believers; and it was contrasted not with “faith-based community” (which would imply an unfortunate contrast between faith and reality) but with the “reality-creating community” of the Bush administration (although those words were never used). Instead, the phrase “faith-based” is a term introduced by the George W. Bush administration to apply to religion, and justify spending federal funds on religious groups, despite the establishment clause of the first amendment that prevents the establishment of a religion (which is taken by most, but not the right wing legal “scholars”, as a prohibition against endorsing religion over non-religion).

Feser’s errors here individually are minor, but they are symptomatic of his general laxity with respect to the opinions and arguments of his opponents (indeed, exactly the same sort of laxity that he accuses his opponents of). These minor errors suggests a failure to make critical distinctions, to paint all opponents with a broad brush (conflating atheists with liberals) despite important distinctions among them, and basing those critiques on things the atheists never said. All of these problems are a disheartening beginning to a work for which I had some hope.

These three examples illustrate a general trend that led me to the following conclusions:
First, the book is polemical. Its purpose is to attack the opposing position, and it is not necessarily going to be fair and considered in doing so.

Second, the book revels in ad hominems. By focusing on the condescension and attitudes of the atheists, one distracts from the arguments and evidence for and against theism (whether this is his purpose or not). While we all enjoy a good ad hominem diatribe against our opponents, these attacks are gratuitous, unseemly, and, largely absent from the books (at least the Dawkins and Dennett books) that he critiques. Even if he were correct about the character, scholarship and intellect of his opponents, these facts would have no bearing on the truth of a position from claims about the individuals espousing it.

Third, Feser cleverly lowers the bar for argumentative quality in the book. If one focuses on the condescension of one’s opponents, one does not need to make one’s arguments fully convincing. All one has to show is that the condescension is unwarranted, and one can do that by showing that a reasonable perhaps might accept them, not that any reasonable person must accept them.

It remains to be seen whether these arguments can meet these standards. That will be the topic for further posts.

Some Thoughts on Carlin Romano "Is America Philosophical?"

Carlin Romano argues in an article, “Is America Philosophical?” in the Chronicle of Higher Education that America is in many respects a philosophical nation. In effect, he answers his own question, that yes, Americans are philosophical in that they are engaged in the kind of public reasoning and debate that characterizes philosophy.

Romano is certainly correct that public debate in America often centers on philosophical ideas and sometimes even addresses philosophical arguments, but he completely ignores the question of whether these debates are informed by good philosophical reasoning. If two drunks in a bar argue about marriage equality (whether same sex marriage should be legal), they are engaged in a debate on a philosophical question, but they still may fail to be philosophical. If one argues that the Bible says marriage is between one man and one woman (who are the lucky pair, I always wonder), that person is not really philosophical or a philosopher. If the other actually asks what the grounds are for moral acceptability of entering into a contractual relationship, and considers the reasons for those grounds, then that person is being philosophical. So, I will start off skeptical of Romano's claim. Americans are to some degree philosophical (in that many do reason in this way even if they don’t call it ‘philosophy’), but, so far, polls on most issues that generally require critical, even philosophical, thought, do not lead to the conclusion that a majority of Americans are good at philosophical reasoning. (This situation may be changing on the marriage equality front at any rate assuming that critical thought strongly favors marriage equality, and opposition to same sex marriage strongly indicates lack of such thought. Further, this assumes that supporters of same sex marriage are basing their beliefs on such reasoning.) So, my guess is that the majority of Americans (and even American opinion columnists) are, depending on your definition, either not very good at philosophy or not really philosophical at all.

The article is interesting but contains weirdness. Romano writes, in the course of arguing that little of Americans' insatiable media appetite is directed towards philosophers,

Despite a seemingly bottomless appetite for guests, neither the nation's better TV talk shows nor its tabloid trash fests have ever hosted America's great philosophers, even in a pandering format (''Philosophers Who Sleep With Their Ideological Opponents!!!'').

I don’t recall a lot of philosophers on talk shows, but Harry Frankfurt has been on the Daily Show twice, and just recently Stephen Colbert had Michael Sandel on to talk about his book about the limits of capitalism. I think a good part of the reason Frankfurt was on was for the publication of his book (actually a reprinted article from 1978) On Bullshit. Maybe this was just an excuse to have a guest use the word ‘Bullshit’ repeatedly on the show, but these cases appear to contradict Romano’s thesis. The examples actually strengthen Romano’s actual thesis a bit that America does provide some public space for philosophy and philosophers. Later in the article, the author does mention the Frankfurt book:

The combination of title and microsize accounted for the book's allure more than Frankfurt's reasoning, which, the retired Princeton University Spinoza scholar charmingly told one interviewer, he no longer considered cogent.

This sentence should be bronzed. The book is badly argued because the scholar no longer considers it cogent? By that standard, we should burn everything written by Bertrand Russell and Hilary Putnam. On Bullshit is a nice piece of ordinary language analysis, and I don’t think Frankfurt’s misgivings about his argument mean that it was not a worthwhile piece. Moreover, here’s the thing, Romano admits that philosophers do appear on television but invents some ad hoc justification for taking that counterexample off the table. Frankfurt was on a television interview show; hence, philosophers are given time on American interview shows. That's a clear counterexample to his claim. But, no, their appearances only count if the work is a good one (minimally indicated by the author continuing to find his/her own work cogent after 30 years). If Romano knows about the interview, how can he say that America’s great philosophers have never been interviewed? Is the Daily Show not one of the nation's “better TV talk shows”? If he thinks the Daily Show is not one of the better ones, what on earth qualifies as a better one? Or is Frankfurt not a great philosopher? After all, according to the author, he’s just a ‘retired Princeton University Spinoza scholar’. On the other hand, wouldn’t it count more strongly for the idea that talk shows interview philosophers if even not-great philosophers can get them? (By the way, I really like Harry Frankfurt but I’m not taking a stand on whether he’s great or not. Who knows what counts as a great philosopher? Romano doesn’t tell us anyway.)

Now Romano turns to critics of American culture, to those who think Americans are, on the whole, pig ignorant and even have a culture that celebrates pig-ignorance. (Does this thesis need to be defended? Does Romano own a television set?)

In Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, Charles Pierce argued that we live in the land of his title, "the America of the medicine wagon and the tent revival, the America of the juke joint and the gambling den," that we remain "the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy."

Romano responds:

Pierce's prime evidence—conservative talk-show hosts and intelligent-design advocates—hardly made his case. . . Indeed, sound judgments about American culture always depend on how one sifts and looks at large swaths of evidence, not an example here or there.

I’m not following this at all. I haven’t read Pierce’s book, but if the quotation states his thesis adequately, it seems as though conservative talk show hosts and intelligent design advocates (aka creationists) provide a fairly compelling case that being professionally dumb or scientifically misinformed can be highly lucrative in America. I’m not sure that makes America the” best country ever” in which to be professionally stupid, but it appears Pierce is guilty only of hyperbole not poor statistical reasoning.

Romano continues arguing that Americans ain’t so dumb after all:

Religious fundamentalism in the United States, for instance, is seen by some as the embodiment of irrationality. But it's also possible for even an atheist to argue that religious thought persists not because believers are dimwitted, but because concepts like God and faith possess logical peculiarities that stymie disproof of religious belief in the absence of prior agreement on how one defines terms.

Does he know what religious fundamentalists believe? Has he checked the polls (or, “look[ed] at large swaths of evidence, not an example here or there”) on scientific (not philosophical) illiteracy? It’s not just that people have a philosophical disagreement about the existence of God, it’s that approximately 40% of Americans believe in the Genesis account of creation. That account is totally inconsistent with huge swaths of modern science. There is nothing about the concept of God or faith that can account for this level of scientific illiteracy. Scientific illiteracy does not imply philosophical illiteracy, but it’s hard to do good philosophy when you have no grounding in the basic scientific facts. If you really think that the Genesis account of creation is accurate (and presumably coherent with the scientific evidence), then you are not going to be open to a sophisticated philosophical argument about belief in the absence of testability.

I’m really digging the weird asides in this article. He dubs Richard Rorty, “America's most important recent philosopher”. Who does he think he’s kidding? I suppose this all depends on what you mean by “most important” and “recent”.

Romano does have a few well-chosen examples of philosophy in American popular culture. He notes the popularity of the Philosophy blog, the Stone, at the New York Times, of the philosophy and popular culture series (e.g. Philosophy and the Simpsons), and of some philosophy joke books. How does this compare in popularity to the typical Youtube video of a guy being hit in the nuts? Or a cat playing the piano? In an enormous and diverse country such as America, there are many pieces of anecdotal evidence (rather than “large swaths of evidence”) supporting either side on this question. Some Americans in some circumstances definitely have some philosophical interest and inclinations, but there is not enough support here for a conclusion as broad as Romano’s. (Maybe he includes the further evidence in his book America the Philosophical. However, I don't think I will be racing off to buy it.)

Romano concludes,

Americans have thus not so much "evaded" philosophy, in the provocative phrase of Cornel West, as they've sidestepped antiquated conceptions of it. In the post-positivist, post-cold-war, pan-Google era in which we live, America the Philosophical can be seen as a coruscating achievement in the pragmatist project that's been unfolding for centuries.

I’ll agree that there’s lively debate on philosophical issues in America, but it’s not yet a “coruscating achievement” of philosophical argument. It's more like an occasional spark.